07/21/11 • SMOKIN’ FRIED CHICKEN From the June/July, 2011 Fine Cooking (click here to view the recipe) One of my favorite food memories from childhood was when my mother would cook up a batch of her amazing fried chicken. Back then, with a fulltime job and three kids to feed, she’d maximize her efforts by frying enough chicken parts to last the week — something which typically meant her having to stand at the s

07/14/11 • LULU’S TUNA BURGER From Cook’s Illustrated Summer Entertaining, 2011 (click here to view the recipe) One of the magical things about food is the way it can instantly trigger a memory or a feeling, much the way a piece of music can. Of course, depending on the particular circumstances of the meal in question that can be good, bad, or somewhere in-between — a reality I’ve been grappling with as I’ve tr

07/08/11 • LUNCH, LOUISIANA-STYLE From the June, 2011 Bon Appetit (click here to view the recipe) One of the rewards of working on this blog has been the fact that it’s forced me to cook outside my comfort zone — to try those things that in the past might have made me slow down for a moment and say, “Oh, that looks good,” but which for whatever reason seemed too intimidating to actually try myself. Case in point: the

07/05/11 • BEST STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE From the June/July, 2011 Fine Cooking (click here to view the recipe) One of my summer dessert standards is something I call “cheater’s strawberry shortcake” — basically a good store bought pound cake (there’s a lemon glazed variety at Citarella that I like a lot for this), topped with macerated strawberries and whipped cream, sweetened with a little sugar and vanilla. It’s pretty

07/01/11 • CLASSIC POTATO SALAD From the June/July, 2011 Saveur (click here to view the recipe) When summer rolls around I find there are certain foods I’m drawn to that during the rest of the year barely register on my desirability meter. For some of these this has to do with an impulse to capitalize on what’s freshest and most in season, but for others it’s simply a Pavlovian response to the weather and everything

06/28/11 • SAUCY PORK BARBECUE From the June/July, 2011 Saveur (click here to view the recipe) When I was a teenager there was an amazing barbecue joint called The Rib Crib not far from where my father and stepmother lived in the Philadelphia neighborhood of West Mt. Airy. Despite its proximity to the historically high WASP zip code of Chestnut Hill, the take-out operation — little more than a chipped formica counter

06/24/11 • CACIO E PEPPER From The Best of America’s Test Kitchen, 2011 (click here to view the recipe) Thumbing through the 2011 edition of The Best of America’s Test Kitchen I came across a recipe for a dish that’s been popping up in a lot of the cooking magazines lately — spaghetti with pecorino and pepper, or as it’s known in Italy, Cacio e Pepe. I don’t know why this one called out to me exactly: maybe it’s how

06/21/11 • TOMATO COBBLER From the July, 2011 Martha Stewart Living (click here to view the recipe) One of the benefits of obsessively flipping through the various cooking magazines each month is that from time to time you land on a dish you know will end up in regular rotation on your dinner table. Such is the case with the cherry tomato cobbler pictured here, from the July issue of Martha Stewart Living. This is a

06/17/11 • DUTCH BABY PANCAKE From the Dec., 2010 GQ Here’s something I’ve noticed about recipes in men’s magazines: they’re generally easy to prepare while offering a big payoff in the flavor department. I guess it’s not that surprising given their audience—If you want to interest most guys in cooking, there better be minimal effort with maximum reward. While I don’t necessarily fall within that category, I apprecia

06/14/11 • ROAST CHICKEN DINNER From the Oct., 2005 Gourmet (click here to view the recipe) When it was announced a few years back that Gourmet was ceasing publication, I, along with many other food lovers, treated the news like there’d been a death in the family. That may seem like an over-reaction to the closing of a business I had no obvious connection to, but though I’d never worked for the magazine nor been clos